The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (21 page)

“You’re livin’ like a loser,” Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow), tells Danny when she first visits his apartment. Tina is the widow of a Mafia hit man whose aspirations to a career in interior decoration have her imagining room decors as tasteful—and as unlike Eve’s—as Danny’s wardrobe. The two are thrown together on the day of Lou’s appearance at the Waldorf, the singer insisting that he can’t go on without knowing his lover is in the audience. It’s the contrast of his “loser” humanist values—concern for others and “acceptance, forgiveness, and love”—with her hard-bitten “looking out for number one” ethic which provides a central thematic tension for the film. (Whereas the moralism of
Manhattan’s
Isaac Davis is self-righteous and self-serving, Danny’s is generously permeated by altruistic impulses. Nothing reflects the comedian’s subjective needs in recounting his story more clearly than its dramatization of Danny’s betrayal by the callous, self-interested, antihumanistic values of show business.) Undergirding the main comic business of
Broadway Danny Rose—
an extended chase scene occupying much of the heart of the film in which Tina and Danny are pursued by Johnny Rispoli’s brothers, who are intent upon rubbing out “Danny White Roses” for stealing Tina from Johnny—is a debate between the couple about personal responsibility to others, a debate ultimately resolved by Tina’s eventual acknowledgment of the inevitability of guilt to human interaction.

Early in the film when Lou Canova reveals his adulterous relationship with Tina to Danny, Danny points to the sky and warns the singer, “Some day you’re gonna have to square yourself with the big guy”; Danny later admits that he doesn’t believe in God, but he’s “guilty over it.” Tina spends the last third of the film attempting to square herself with all that the movie offers her to square herself with—the litde guy, Danny. Tina appears uninvited at Danny’s annual Thanksgiving bash (he serves his performers frozen turkey TV dinners each year) with his Uncle Sidney’s trio of virtues—“acceptance, forgiveness, and love”—on her lips, having in the last weeks undergone an object lesson in the validity of Danny’s philosophy of life: “It’s important to have some laughs, no question about it, but you got to suffer a little, too. Because otherwise, you miss the whole point of life” (p. 254).

No Woody Allen film ends in a more completely earned or more satisfying sense of closure than
Broadway Danny Rose
. The conciliation scene between Danny and Tina takes place with charmingly corny aptness outside the Carnegie Deli in which the comedians, some years later, would be nostalgically reconstructing the couple’s adventure together.
⁴
In order not to overextend the happy ending, Allen signals only with calculated indirection the inevitable romantic resolution and Danny’s post-narrative progress from “a bum to a hero.” In the film’s final scene, Sandy Baron reveals that the Carnegie Deli has elevated Danny to the status of Broadway luminary through introducing a sandwich intermixing Danny’s Jewish and Tina’s Italian heritages called the “Danny Rose Special,” the offering consisting, Morty Gunty speculates, of cream cheese on bagel with marinara sauce. Whether the sandwich Danny has become is a hero or not is left to the viewer to decide. Significantly,that sandwich is all that remains of Danny Rose in the film’s present—he has become inseparable from the story told about him, or, as John Pym suggested, “he has faded into the mythical anecdotes of his peers.”
⁵
It is his withdrawal into the status of the legendary that largely accounts for the film’s untypical—for Allen—happy ending,
Broadway Danny Rose
reinforcing the point implicit in
Radio Days
that happy endings are possible only for fictional characters.

Inspired by this heartwarming resolution, jocularity prevails as the closing titles scroll over some good-natured banter between the comics about the length of Baron’s Danny Rose story and expressions of surprise at Corbett Monica’s uncharacteristically picking up the evening’s check. It’s clear that the telling of the “greatest Danny Rose story” has accomplished what efficacious myths effect: it has magically altered ordinary human interactions in the Carnegie Deli. Gunty affirms that the comedians will meet again tomorrow for more nostalgia, more talk of the old days, but it’s evident that we’ve heard the story they most needed and wanted to tell. To understand how
Broadway Danny Rose
manages to reach what so few Allen films do—an unambiguously happy ending—it’s necessary to recognize how completely the fable’s resolution depends on the needs and agendas of its community of tellers. (In response to Will Jordan’s account of how he came to impersonate James Mason, Howard Storm indirectly calls attention to the mediatory role of the comedians in
Broadway Danny Rose
, asking “But this thing is all in like the mask, right?” [p. 150]. Right.) At the bleakest point in Sandy Baron’s narrative (Danny, fired by Lou on the night of his nostalgia act’s biggest showbiz success, walks out of Roosevelt Hospital into a rainstorm after visiting Barney Dunn, for whose pulverization by Mafia thugs he’s inadvertently responsible), Morty Gunty objects, “I thought this was a funny story. Its terrible!”(p. 291) The story is destined not to end terribly because of the purpose its telling is serving the tellers and the told.

Before they embark upon their communal Danny Rose narrative, the assembled comedians shmooze about the condition of the world of show business as they experience it in the films present, the early 1980s. It’s not good. The old failsafe jokes they’ve traditionally stolen from each other for their routines aren’t working anymore; there are far fewer rooms for comedians to play in the New York metropolitan area, obliging them to travel as far as Baltimore and Washington for jobs and to have much better tires than they previously needed; audiences are neither as reliable or as loyal as they once were. “They never left,” Baron recalls mournfully, invoking the old crowds in the old venues devoted solely to comedy, “they never left at all” (p. 149). It is no coincidence that to counter these present miseries and cheer themselves up the story Baron and his fellow comics enthusiastically choose is that of Danny Rose, who—at least in their nostalgic reconstruction of him—is notable primarily for his unstinting and unequivocal loyalty to his acts. “His acts were so devoted,” Will Jordan comments, “They loved him … I mean, where you gonna find that kind of devotion today?” (p. 154) In his
Commonweal
review, Baumbach characterized
Broadway Danny Rose
as “a comedy about mythmaking,”
⁶
which I take to mean that what were watching in the movie is the comedians’ construction of the myth which is “the greatest Danny Rose story.” So it’s quite appropriate that the first flashback scene the comedians evoke of Danny (the first in which Allen appears in the movie) dramatizes his attempt to sell his acts to the booking agent for Weinstein’s Majestic Bungalow Colony and includes a discussion of the disloyalty—foreshadowing Lou’s defection—of one of Danny’s recent acts who had begun to prosper in show business. “They get a little success,” Phil the Colony booking agent tells Danny, “and they leave you” (p. 155). Danny, to the contrary, “would work his tail off for his acts … if he believed in them,” comedian Howard Storm insists. The comics agree that making his clients believe in themselves constituted much of the “star, smile, strong” strategy of “Danny Rose, Personal Management.”

“I don’t see you folding balloons in joints,” Danny insists in a typical client-motivation spiel, “You’re gonna fold these balloons in universities and colleges … you’re gonna make your snail and your elephant at, at, on Broadway,” and thus become “one of the great balloon-folding acts of all time” [p. 154]. It’s in this goofily sincere belief in other people and his endless encouragement of them that Danny Rose differs most radically from every other Woody Allen protagonist, and if his character is the sentimental idealization of show business of an earlier decade projected by aging, demoralized, and nostalgic comics,
⁷
he represents Allen’s least Woody Allenesque portrayal and Allen’s single most accomplished job of comic acting.

Vincent Canby eloquently described
Broadway Danny Rose
as “a love letter not only to American comedy stars and to all those pushy hopefuls who never made it to the top in show business, but also to the kind of comedy that nourished the particular genius of Woody Allen,”
⁸
his characterization effectively accounting for the unequivocality of the film’s address to the viewer’s emotions. Gilbert Adair’s review of the film summarized the affective quality of Allen’s performance equally elegantly: Danny recalls Chaplin’s “little man” and, “reincarnated here as Danny Rose, he
is
pathetic, melancholic, droll, poignant, affecting—that whole Thesaurus of sentimental adjectives covered by the outmoded but not quite obsolete critical commonplace ‘Chaplinesque.’ Danny is a born loser; and the film’s premise, one of the most moving it’s possible to imagine, is the ultimate triumph of the loser over his fate.”
⁹
All that Adair’s eloquent description omits is the fact that it’s the Carnegie comedians who are engaging in the communal act of wish-fulfillment which is the story of this loser triumphing over his fate. Lacking the actual Danny himself for reassurance, they are creating their own elaborate narrative version of “star, smile, strong” to buck themselves up as they prepare to schlep themselves to Baltimore and New Jersey to perform their gigs.

For Baron and his fellow comics, Danny is the epitome of a lost world in which performers like themselves—and even those still more inferior and small time—were cared for, valued in a way these comedians’ opening exchange proves that they no longer are. (That a couple of the comedians turn out to have attended one of Danny’s TV dinner Thanksgiving feasts affirms their largely unacknowledged solidarity with Danny’s exotic acts.) Because there
is
no Danny Rose beyond Sandy Baron’s narrative, it is impossible to distinguish fact from myth in the film; all we have is the “landlocked Hebrew” of their telling, whose message is “acceptance, forgiveness, and love” and who will arguably become more noble and self-sacrificing with every telling of his story by the comedians who ritualistically gather at the Carnegie Deli to cheer themselves with sentimental constructions of the superiority of yesterday to today. David Denby’s objection that “not even Damon Runyon, Broadway fabulist and designer of improbable matches, could have imagined that this girl [Tina] is for that guy [Danny]”
¹⁰
assumes that the film’s conclusion is dictated by real-world probability; insofar as Danny and Tina are united in the film’s close, it’s only because the comedians, in their affection for their hero, believe
he deserves her
.
¹¹
For his loyalty to his acts, for his epitomizing humanistic values in an increasingly inhumane industry, the comedians’ myth- weaving rewards Danny with Tina. That’s the story they tell themselves; that’s the story we see. It’s not even certain, in fact, that the “Danny Rose Special”
does
marry Jewish and Italian cultures: although Morty Gunty asserts it’s “[p]robably a cream cheese on a bagel with marinara sauce” (p. 309), neither he nor the other comedians seems to have the heart to check the Carnegie Deli menu board a few feet away from their table for fear, perhaps, of finding that the honorary sandwich is actually cream cheese and lox on bagel.

Only the narrative intercession of “sentimental bores” like Baron, Gunty, Corbett Monica, Jackie Gayle, Howard Storm, Will Jordan, and (perennial Allen film producer) Jack Rollins,
¹²
with their communal need to remember a better day in American showbiz and to provide themselves with a Danny Rosean pep talk brightening their future prospects, could transform the workings of Danny’s Godless, guilt-laden universe into the encouraging little fable with its lovely, morality-affirming resolution which is
Broadway Danny Rose
.Only their benevolently mediational presence and Allen’s obvious affection for them and the world they embody can account for the generation of this most artistically consonant and happiest of Woody Allen endings.

“You’re livin like a loser,” we’ve already heard Tina tell Danny. As we’ve also noticed, Gilbert Adair took her at her word, describing Allen’s protagonist’s character as that of “a born loser” whose triumph is that of “a loser over his fate”; Andrew Sarris concurred, designating Danny “a pathetic loser who lives in a rat hole”
¹³
; Daphne Merkin took a different tack by being offended that the film evoked concern from the audience for Danny rather than “the losers who surround” him,
¹⁴
acts whom Joseph Gelmis characterized as Danny’s “‘family’ of show biz losers.”
¹⁵
Jack Kroll in
Newsweek
was more egalitarian in conferring the status on both agent and clients, seeing Danny as “a loser selling losers,”
¹⁶
while David Denby perceived the same redemptive movement in the film Adair did, viewing
Broadway Danny Rose
as “a fable about how losers can become winners.” It’s interesting that these reviewers—some of whom find Tina an unconvincing character—nonetheless so emphatically endorse her social Darwinist ethic. She knows losers when she sees them, and so do they. Given the near-unanimity of this descriptor’s application to Danny and his acts, it’s worthwhile to briefly consider the validity of the label “loser” so liberally conferred not only upon characters in
Broadway Danny Rose
but to Allen’s “nebbish” protagonists in general. Although somewhat tangential to the issue of Allen’s ambivalence toward art, the “loser” tag so uncritically applied to Allen’s characters may have done more to blind reviewers and critics to the nuances of Allen’s vision than any other misperception.